I'm disappointed we haven't heard anything yet. I might end up picking up Scoria instead and calling it.

 

Try asking @dalianjj about it directly by shooting him a PM. He'd be the one to know. Had I not asked him a few days ago I would never have known that the Grinder X and G v2 dino were being released this past week.

 

I'd rather not pester him. I'm guessing he gets PMd on a regular basis and probably has better things to do than respond to me. I'm just being a little impatient and was hoping someone on the boards had some info.

 

Trust me it's no biggie. That's what inboxes are for. I ask him questions all the time and he replies. If he doesn't I send him a reminder and all is well. Don't be afraid to reach out so you can get your questions answered.

 

Having started collecting the DiBots after Cesium's reveal, I opted to round out the rest of the team before deciding which figure would end up repping Slag in my collection.

So with four DiBots down, last (And definitely least), we have Cesium.

Moving from the true F/T DiBots to Cesium feels like trading in your $30,000 car for one that costs half as much. Yes, all the parts are there and it essentially operates the same way, but the whole experience feels cheaper and less refined. Plastic quality and parts fit aren't as good as we've come to expect from FansToys. The overall construction feels less solid. The transformation itself isn't complicated, but still manages to be a joyless affair due to the usual F/T tolerance issues, now with the added wrinkle of some super-thin plastic parts. Getting my Cesium to fully peg in together in dino mode feels like handling a wound-up a jack in the box that will pop the second I take my hands off him.

I didn't have a solid opinion about Cesium's size before getting him. In-hand, he's absolutely too big. Especially in robot mode where he looks like he could clean Grinder's clock. Visually, he's my de-facto DiBot leader because of how he presents himself. Which isn't right at all.




The sculpt in both modes is good. Which is why I opted for him over Scoria in the first place.

Ultimately, Cesium feels like what he is - the answer to the question of if you can build a passable DiBot for $140. And I'm left wondering if that's a question anyone was really asking. As if the people who've already plowed $800-$1000 into their 3P Dinobots would have balked at spending an extra $60 for a F/T Scoria 2.0 done to the same standards as their Grinder and Stomp. And let's face it - an actual Scoria 2.0 is what most people wanted.

I've opted to order a reissue Scoria this afternoon. I'll do a comparison of the two when he arrives, but my expectation is that Cesium will be offloaded in favor of the OG.

What a disappointment....

 

Tbh, if Scoria's hips weren't such a hot mess of collapsing when trying to pose the one I handled a year ago, I would have gotten Scoria rather than waiting for Caesium. =\
Not sure if they're all like that, but it was bad enough to deter me from going the Scoria route.

 

Thanks. I've been seriously considering getting him but the reviews haven't been very favorable. I'm curious: if you weren't comparing him to FT's other figures; if you were comparing him to all the other 3p companies in a world where Fanstoys didn't exist; how do you think he'd stand up?

As for the cost, some of us never bought any dibots because the $200 per figure price was too much. If we knew that pf was going to do the full set, I'd probably buy this guy right now, but if I got him now, I'd be looking at a mismatched set involving Reximus and I'd probably be stuck paying $200 each for the other 3. That's no good.

 

imho, I'd rate him even lower if the other Dibots didn't exist, as I honestly don't care for any of them. They're big and clunky and the engineering is dated and they feel like big toys instead of more refined adult collectible versions of the toys we had as kids in the '80s (which is what Masterpiece is supposed to be about, imo). I only got Caesium to check the box and complete the set but I'd rather not have any of the five of them. I still occasionally considering selling the Dibots and just using the DX9 War in Pocket dinos as stand-in G1 Dinobots. That would also free up an entire shelf needed to hold the five big goons. =P

 

For the record, I'm not knocking anyone who opted out of the DiBots due to price. Paying a grand for five toys is a ridiculous proposition. A more affordable option would be welcome. Unfortunately Perfect Fusion has said they have no immediate interest in producing the other Dinobots. So Cesium is stuck being either a DiBot stand-in/competitor to Scoria or a one-off purchase.

He does stack up more favorably when taken on his own merits. My biggest unsolvable issue with this guy is his size, which obviously isn't an problem if you aren't trying to round out a DiBot collection with him.

Apart from that, my gripes mainly deal with tolerances and transformation. Transforming him is not fun. Most Fanstoys products are built like bomb shelters and with how some of their parts move, they need to be. I have to use both hands and my bicep strength to extend Grinder's forearms because the slider is so damn tight. The only reason I can do that and not end up with a figure in two pieces is because of how well he's built. So then you have Cesium with his bog-standard plastic. In most places it's a non-issue, but he has a flimsy multi-hinged panel that pegs into his back in dino mode. It seems to need excessive force to plug in and half the time it just wants to pop back out after it's been pegged. It's just one more spot on a Fanstoys figure that you have to wrestle with, but now you're also freaking out about stressing and breaking the part in the process. If I knew I was keeping him, I might have tried to mod the part. I think some folks have done that with some success. So perhaps you could make this a non-issue for yourself.

I don't think Cesium is an objectively terrible figure. My 3P experience is limited to seven F/T products (including the DiBots), seven Reformatted toys, two MakeToys products, Badcubes' Insecticons and UT Allen. Of that cohort, I'd probably rank Cesium in the bottom 30% due to fears of breakage and not being especially fun to handle or transform.

 

Swapped my parts over to the toy colour ones today, looks amazing. My word though, I love FT but the screws they use are pretty crap. You need to use the utterly perfect fit screwdriver else they strip instantly, and even then you only get maybe one or two swap outs before the heads go. Cesiums horns will not go back on tightly (swapped to red ones) now because the teeny tiny little screws are a half turn away from completely having stripped heads. Will have to ebay some spares but you really shouldnt have to.

 

Really? that's a fair amount of cash just to 'check the box'.

 

There aren't any other G1 MP Dinobots to compete with them and no sign of any on the horizon, so the completionist in me won on being able to complete the Season One cast vs waiting a minimum of a couple more YEARS for someone else to deliver dinos. Just waiting on MMC or XTB to deliver their Cliffjumper!  

 

I recently mentioned in the Zeta Aerialbots thread that one of the nice things about their Air Raid was that he was fun to transform (aside from the problematic front landing gear). I didn't realize at first why that was so delightful to me but it hit me yesterday. None of my 3p transformers are fun. Oh they look great and I love them but I don't just grab them if the shelf to transform for the fun of it because they're just not fun.

Ft Willis and Koot: not fun. Badcube insecticons: not too bad but not all that fun either. Wardog: haha, nope. Apollyon, Ollie, and Arkose: hahahahahahaha*gasp*hahahahaha!! Downbeat: not bad but a few fiddly parts kinda kill any fun to be had. Quakeblast is alright but his transformation is so simple that it doesn't feel like you're accomplishing anything and there's always digging out his gun barrel from wherever I keep it stashed while also bring careful not to break his arm gun. I feel like I'm missing some but I'm not at my display right now. So yeah, it just seems to me that 3p figures aren't fun to transform while just about all of my hastak figures are. Not that it'll stop me from buying them: I love my 3p figures and they look amazing on the shelf.

 

Dude, you have a serious plastic crack addiction if you spent over a grand just to have them. Your admitting you don’t even like them. Why even buy them then? I sometimes buy figures I occasionally grow tired of, but I don’t buy figures I know I don’t like.

 

I don't really disagree. The third party figures that are coming out look great but I still think Takara does the best job for their transformations. I would love it if some of the third parties could make transforming more enjoyable.

 

I like Cesium, to be honest. I admire the sculpt and some of the improvements (the hips, the horns, the hand holding the sword) that Scoria fails on in an impressive fashion.

However, the aesthetic difference between the rest of the Dibots is noticeable. If PF did the rest of the Dibots, you would have less of an issue (and you'd have a choice of Dinobot sculpts and aesthetic). I'll bet if PF gets on their horse and we see four more Dinobots in the next couple of years this Cesium vs. Scoria issue will go away.

 

Because they're okay and they complete the cast, they're just not quite everything I'd want in MP Dinobots. It was more like 800 and they can be resold at some point to recoup some of that, so it's not like it was a waste..

 

Yours must be different screws to those on mine. They are in mint condition. Normally screws get damaged when the driver you use is too big or small. I use a fairly decent precision set with about 16 different sized heads. Always a perfect fusion of screw and driver...

 

There are exceptions, but by and large, the companies making MP-style figures are all too ready to sacrifice fun for the sake of slavish G1 accuracy. The only reliable exception to that rule seems to be TakaraTomy themselves.

The CHUG-scale stuff fares a lot better there. MMC's Reformatted line and (from what I've heard) MakeToy's Cross-Dimension figures, both produce some fun toys that are a joy to flip around. If you find yourself with a spare $80, something like Calidus or Turben might scratch that itch for you.

 

Well, I'm not so sure it's a problem. At least for me. I buy there figures primarily because they look good. I like to see them on my shelf. I also like to grab one and fiddle with it every now and then but that's secondary. I know my priorities aren't the same as everybody else's but for me I consider it a bonus that Air Raid is fun to transform. I mean if Wardog for example were fun to transform but was ugly, I wouldn't have bought him.